by Castle, Jack
Before the fireman could answer Mr. Blowhard said, “Yeah. That sounds like a plan.” Then addressing the room, as though he had been in charge all along, he said with his hands held out high in front of him. “Alright, people, we’re going to post guards. Everyone should try and get some rest. In about eight hours, we’ll wake you everybody up, and if the storm has let up, walk over to the diner together for some breakfast.”
Everyone nodded, some muttering their own version of consent, and moved toward the hallway and their rooms. As soon as Miss Becca began to turn away, Mr. Blowhard grumbled under his breath, “Coward.”
Oh no. He didn’t.
Mrs. Becca whirled around, grabbed Blowhard by his jacket and erupted into his face, “What did you just say to me?” Before Mr. Blowhard could answer, she continued, “You think I’m scared to die? I’m not. Ever since that bomb took away the only two things I ever cared about in this world I’m not scared to die… I’m scared to live.”
“Let me go,” Mr. Blowhard said weakly.
Miss Becca didn’t seem to hear his plea. “I may not be scared to die, but whatever’s here, in this motel, makes me think there are a lot worse things than dying.”
“C’mon, Becca,” Big Leonard said unhappily. “He’s just scared, too.”
Becca held Mr. Blowhard for a second longer and then roughly released him. So hard he practically tripped over his own feet and fell down.
As the big lineman and the fireman led Miss Becca away, everyone else retreated down the hall. It was then that Peyton caught the most peculiar thing out of the corner of her eye. Sitting next to her, in a cloud of smoke Elaine was flashing the departing motel guests the most fiendish smile, as if to say, ‘Ha-ha, I got you.’
There is something seriously wrong with that woman, Pey-Pey.
Shut up, Marty. And then turning to Elaine, “I think I’ll have one of those cigarettes now.”
It took Elaine a moment to recover from realizing that Peyton had been watching her but when she did she reached inside her saddle-bag and said, “Of course, Pey-Pey, of course.”
Peyton put the cigarette clumsily into her mouth. And as the old woman lit the cigarette for her, Peyton wondered, Wait a minute. I don’t remember telling her my nickname in elementary school.
(Good-bye Norma Jean, though I never… What? You don’t like that song?)
(What’s it have to do with anything?)
(Does it really matter?)
(Did you really think that by the end of this little tale everything was going to be tied up in a nice, pretty little bow?)
(Don’t you know?)
(Haven’t you figured it out yet?)
(I’m stalling. Outside these tiny little margins, things have already begun to set in motion.)
(Why am I telling you this now?)
(Because, silly... It’s too late to stop it. It’s too late for anyone to stop it.)
Chapter 29
Talking about Demons
“You done?”
Even though Becca could still feel her body quivering all over, she nodded in agreement. “Yeah. I’m done.” She was so angry the blood still pulsated in her ears. Wally helped her sit down onto one of the chairs in the lobby and once she did she sat with her hands on her knees waiting to puke, pass out, or a combo of both.
After the last few people had sauntered off to their rooms, the very last being Elaine and Peyton, the feeling finally began to pass. She looked up at Wally standing in front of her.
“If you’re good, we’ve got to start thinking about what to do next.”
“I thought you said…” Becca began.
Wally cut her off mid-sentence. “Wait ‘til help arrives? No. That was just for their benefit. I think we need to seriously consider exactly what we’re dealing with here.”
“First, some coffee,” Big Leonard said quietly, holding a glass carafe badly burned on the bottom. “Before heading off to bed that tour director fella boiled us up another pot.”
Becca held up her hand for a second and then let it drop on the armrest. “Sure. Coffee. Why not?”
As Big Leonard poured everyone a cup he lowered his voice so the others couldn’t hear “I took a quick peek down the hall. Mr. Blowhard, his wife and the guy with the golf cap and glasses are still posted up at the other end of the hall. We should be fine. For the time being anyway.”
Soon all four of them were sipping out of Styrofoam cups of what had to be the worst black coffee Becca had ever tasted (and that’s saying a lot seeing how she served in the military for nearly a decade). When she finished gulping hers down, she said, “Ugh. That stuff is gross,” and immediately went and got some more.
As they saw her coming back, they looked up at her with questioning, anxious anticipation. She sat back down wearily on one of the unoccupied high-backed cushiony chairs.
Wally sipped another sip of his own coffee, grimacing after each swallow. Calvin was cradling his cup in his hands and was staring off into space. Big Leonard, now sitting on the couch, was studying the tattered Bible Becca saw earlier. The big lineman had it spread out on the small table in front of him. For a time they all sat there like that, slumped around the coffee table.
Finally it was Becca who broke the silence. “Anybody got any theories on what we might be dealing with here?” Her eyes searched first Wally and then B.L. for answers.
Wally slurped the last bit of his coffee. After lowering the cup from his face he grimaced with disgust as his tongue protruded from his mouth several times trying to scrape the taste off using his teeth.
“Will you knock that off?” Becca asked irritably, but the more he did it the harder it was not to laugh.
“Sorry,” he replied, holding up the cup. “But this is just… just terrible.”
“How about we start with the facts?” Surprisingly, this was from Calvin. “What do we know?”
“What do you mean?” Wally asked, not following.
“Well, according to your story the ravens didn’t attack each other, right? They only attacked you.”
“Yeah, same thing with the coyotes,” Leonard intoned.
“Okay, that’s a start.” Calvin rubbed his hands briskly together. “I wish I had a notebook. Ya know, to write all of this down.”
“There’s probably something to write on in the back offices,” Wally offered.
Calvin’s eyes rolled to the top corner of his eyelids as he thought about it for a second and then said, “Nah, I’ll write it down later. Until then,” he pointed to his temple, “I’ve got it all right here.”
Geez, what a nerd.
Shut your pie-hole, Donnie, Becca warned, and then saw him sitting on the bell clerk’s desk. His legs were crossed and he was swinging them to and fro while contemplating hitting the bell there
“Why is that important?” Wally asked.
“What, the notebook?” asks the nerd.
Becca stifled a small giggle. Calvin, his name is Calvin.
Hah! Now you’re thinking it, too. Donnie then tilted his head to the side and said charmingly, Ya know, lass, you should smile more. You’re a real beaut when ya do.
Becca was dumbfounded. She really didn’t know how to take that. She looked away, angry at herself for not having some quippy comeback.
Wally sighed. “No, the ravens, the coyotes, not attacking each other.”
Calvin answered immediately, “It shows they weren’t rabid. They didn’t turn on each other.”
“Yeah, if anything, it was more like a coordinated attack,” Big Leonard finished for him.
This was good. They were figuring things out now. Getting in on the train of thought (pun intended--you know who I’m talking to) Becca offered, “And whatever is controlling the people, it can’t read our minds. Spence, and Denise, they couldn’t even talk.”
Big Leonard and Calvin nodded in agreement.
“But he did talk.”
Everyone turned toward Wally. “I mean it was gibberish, but Spence was talking. I
heard him.”
Calvin tore his gaze from Wally and looked over at her and asked, “Did you hear him talk too, Becca?”
Becca winced. She did not like the idea of undermining Wally but Big Leonard was right. More lies, or withholding the truth, no matter how crazy, would only get more people killed. “No. I didn’t hear him talk. But I did see him murder two fireman and nearly chop Wally in half.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I got the impression it was just sort of primal rage.”
“What did it sound like?” Big Leonard asked Wally. “The words. Do you remember?”
“I’ve never heard anything like it before,” Wally breathed, the look in his eye as though he were remembering. “And my mom was a linguistics professor; she spoke seven languages around the house when we were kids.”
(Oh my, isn’t that convenient, and right when we needed one, too)
“Was it Latin?” Calvin asked.
Wally made a face. “No. I know what Latin sounds like.”
“A dead language then,” Calvin said a bit too enthusiastically. Whereas everyone else looked downright haggard, the middle-aged nerd seemed to be thriving. And why wouldn’t he? This was the kind of bona fide adventure he only read about in Stephen King novels or watched in movies, and here he was living it. He might feel differently if he had seen all the things we’ve seen, Becca mused.
Kill the nerd! Donnie sang. Kill the nerd! Kill the-ah… nerd--kill the ner-er-er-ddd!
“Come again?” Wally asked.
For a second, Becca thought Wally actually heard Donnie. And spying Donnie’s frozen face, he might have, too. But no, Wally was talking to Calvin.
“There’s no way to be sure, but think about it, if Denise really was possessed by a demon, these things have been around since the dawn of time. She could have been speaking Babylonian.”
“Babylonian?” Wally repeated, his tone filled with disbelief.
“You know… the one true language before the Tower of Babel?”
Becca didn’t like the sound of the word demon and asked for clarification. “What makes you think it was a demon?”
Calvin sipped weakly at his coffee. Measuring his words carefully he said, “What makes you think it’s not? It certainly fits. Demons, in the form of poltergeists, try and kill you with supernatural things, like flinging things at you.” Scanning Big Leonard for approval he asked, “Sound familiar? The tin can hitting you in the head,” and then opening his gaze up to the three of them he added, “…and the animals attacking you as though upon command.”
“The ravens and the coyotes,” Wally offered. When Calvin nodded Wally continued him, “But that still doesn’t explain what happened with Denise.”
“Sure it does. Once a human is recently dead, it becomes a host for the Revenants.”
“Revenants?” Becca asked. “I’m sorry; I’m not familiar with that term.”
Calvin was only happy to explain. “It’s a French word. A Revenant is a demon that possesses the recently deceased. In spirit form it can fling things like a Jedi (nerd) and have authority over wild animals, but when it inhabits someone who is recently deceased, it becomes very strong and resilient to damage.”
As much as Becca wanted to refute what Calvin was saying this Revenant theory certainly fit perfectly.
Wally still wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know, this all seems pretty far-fetched, even for everything that has happened to us. Do people even believe in this stuff anymore?”
Big Leonard had been fairly quiet until now. When he did speak, it was in a low hushed undertone. “As a young man I was stationed overseas and visited Jerusalem once. I was pretty shocked to find out that on the Mount of Olives the Jews leave their dead in caskets above ground. We’re talking stacks and stacks of caskets, at last count, over one-hundred-and-fifty thousand. Now here’s the kicker, on the opposite side, on the Temple Mount, the Muslims are burying their dead too, so when the Lord finally returns, their dead can stop Him from entering the Temple. For over three thousand years, both sides firmly believe that this war of dead corpses is going to take place. So yeah, even though most people right here in good ole U.S.A. might not believe in this stuff, with their fast food, high-speed internet and movie stars, there’s still a whole world out there of about seven billion who never stopped believing in it.”
“Yeah, but demons?” Wally asked.
Big Leonard snapped the Bible closed and held it in one big meaty hand. He then sighed. “I’m afraid what we’re dealing with here is far worse than just a demon.”
“Just a demon? Like that’s not enough?” Becca spat out reflexively.
Big Leonard caught the fear in her voice. He lowered his own even further. “No. And we’re probably dealing with more than just one.”
“Multiple demons? In one body? How is that possible?” Wally asked.
Big Leonard scoffed. “This isn’t new. All this stuff, it’s happened before. Didn’t you ever read the story about Jesus, the Demons, and the Pigs?” When he didn’t get an immediate response, he propped the good book open on the coffee table, leaned over and leafed to the opening passage. “Luke, Chapter Eight, Verse Twenty-Nine. “For Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and even though he was bound with chains and shackles, he broke the chains and been driven by the demon into solitary places. “What is your name?” Jesus asked. “Legion,” the possessed man answered, because many demons had gone into him. And the demons kept begging Jesus not to order them to go into the abyss.…” Big Leonard flipped through the Bible some more and when he found the passage he was looking for he read aloud again, “And in Matthew, Chapter Four, Verse Twenty-Four, it talks about how Jesus cured the demon-possessed.” More flipping of pages, more reading aloud, “And the Book of Job talks about how demons collapsed the roof on his wife and children.”
“You know,” Calvin piped up. “Most people now think that demons were really just undiagnosed mental illness.”
Hearing this Wally cleared the coffee-phlegm from his throat and said, “That’s what I thought too, that is…” raising his voice “…until Denise came back from the dead and lifted me up by my throat and threw the big guy over here into a wall just by looking at him.”
“Hey.” Calvin held up his hands defensively. “We’re just talking out loud here. I think we need to consider all theories.”
“Like what?” Becca asked, a lot harsher than she intended. Forcing herself to calm down a bit more, she rubbed her face and announced, “I have got to get some sleep before I really become unglued.”
Calvin nodded. “Earlier you described a young woman in a Santa Claus hat who you think might’ve been…”
“A ghost.” She shuddered at the memory. Was that really only two nights ago?
“That still doesn’t mean it was something supernatural. There’s this theory that says ghosts are actually people from other times and places. You see a guy from the Civil War and you think, ‘Man I must be looking at a ghost,’ but the truth is, he’s just from another time. A crashed spaceship could cause a time fluctuation like that.”
“Great. We don’t have enough to deal with, now we’re talking about crashed UFOs.”
Calvin’s head bobbed up and down in acquiesce. “I agree, what we’re dealing with here is most likely ghosts or demons.”
“It’s not a spaceman and it’s not ghosts.” Big Leonard said firmly. “Ghosts are spirits, which are deceased, people… er, humans. These are demon spirits. Think ghosts of fallen angels.”
Becca noted her trembling hand as she rubbed at her brow. When she realized they saw it too she quickly pulled it down, sat in a chair, and tucked her hand under her thigh. “What’s your point?”
“My point is all you ever hear about is Lucifer. But the truth of the matter is…” he held up the worn and heavily used and tabulated Bible “…is God allows Lucifer to walk around on Earth. Lucifer’s Captains, however, were so wicked that God had to bind them up in chains before
he cast them down into Hell.” Raising his bushy eyebrows toward them, “And I think that’s what we are dealing with right now.”
“What do they want?” Calvin asked. “Let me guess, zombie Apocalypse, eat our brains.” The middle-aged nerd was attempting to lighten up the situation but only made it more dour.
“If only that were the case. If zombies were to exist, and other than two gentleman who rose from the dead in the Bible, I don’t think they do, zombies supposedly just want to eat your flesh. Demons are far worse.”
“Worse, how?” Wally asked.
Big Leonard lowered his voice. “Demons… they hunger for your agony.” There was a long pause. And then Leonard’s face grew flat and expressionless, as though something had only just occurred to him at that moment. “They could be in any one of us,” looking around the room, “or in all of us.”
Wally nodded and Becca was left feeling haunted.
Enough, Becca thought. The others might be ready to give up without a fight, but, “I for one am not giving up. If all of you were possessed you’d attack me right now. So at least one of you is still human.”
“Yeah, but how do we know who is possessed and who isn’t?” Wally asked.
Calvin, eager to jump back into the conversation said, “According to the movies their heads spin all the way around and they vomit up blood, nails and other things. I don’t see anyone doing that, do you?”
“No,” Big Leonard answered. “But it doesn’t mean they’re not here.”
They still weren’t getting it. They narrowed in on the enemy but they still hadn’t discussed what really mattered. “Hey, I think the more important question we need to be asking ourselves is, how do we kill it?”
Big Leonard sighed, exasperated, “Don’t you get it? You can’t kill a demon. The movies, television shows, they’ve all got it wrong. You can’t kill a demon any more than you can an angel. That… thing....”
“Denise,” Wally interjected glumly. “Her name was Denise. And I killed her.”